Drei chinesischstämmige Genies gründen ein Startup und erreichen einen Unternehmenswert von 72 Milliarden Yuan nach 21 Monaten.

Chinese entrepreneurs are increasingly taking the lead at the AI table in Silicon Valley.

Recently, several media reported that Cognition AI, founded by three Chinese - origin genius students - Scott Wu (hereinafter "Xiao Wu"), Walden Yan (hereinafter "Xiao Yan") and Steven Hao (hereinafter "Xiao Hao") - is currently conducting a financing of over 300 million US dollars. The known investors so far include Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. If this round of financing is successfully completed, the company value of Cognition would rise to 1 billion US dollars (about 7.18 billion yuan), making it another "10 - billion - AI unicorn" founded by Chinese entrepreneurs after Scale AI and Fireworks AI.

More importantly, Cognition has also shown remarkable growth. Cognition was founded in November 2023, and the first investment came from the legendary business angel Peter Thiel. Only five months later, in April 2024, Peter Thiel promoted his Founders Fund to conduct a second - round financing for Cognition, which increased the company value of Cognition to 2 billion US dollars and propelled it into the unicorn rankings.

Before the current financing round, Cognition's last financing round took place in March 2025, led by 8VC, and the company value was 4 billion US dollars. This means that Cognition doubled its company valuation within five months and reached a company value of nearly 7.2 billion yuan in just 21 months.

A 28 - year - old Leads a 7.2 - billion Unicorn

Cognition's story is not long. It emerged at the end of 2023 when AI companies were growing wildly.

To put it simply, it is the story of Xiao Wu, a math genius born in 1997, along with Xiao Hao (a former engineer at Scale AI) and Xiao Yan (a former engineer at Cursor), three genius students who have won IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics) medals. They developed the world's first AI software engineer, Devin, behind closed doors in a "hacker house".

Screenshot from the 20VC podcast

Xiao Wu, co - founder and CEO of Cognition, was born in Louisiana, USA. From a young age, he has shown remarkable talents in mathematical and scientific competitions. At the age of 14, he won the US MathCounts competition, and when he participated in the IOI, he was only 17 years old. On the American programmer community platform Codeforces, Xiao Wu was recognized by his colleagues as a "Legendary Master".

Like many other genius students, Xiao Wu started his entrepreneurial career early. After graduating from high school, Xiao Wu worked for a year and a half in the computer architecture team at Apptar. Later, he studied at Harvard University and represented the university at the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) in 2016, where his team won the third place.

In 2017, Xiao Wu decided to drop out of school and start a company. Before founding Cognition AI, he developed a "AI + Social Media" product called Lunchclub with some friends and was the CTO and co - founder. This startup was very successful. According to available information, Lunchclub received financing from Lightspeed, Coatue and A16z, and the company value was over 100 million US dollars. In 2020, Xiao Wu was included in the Forbes "30 Under 30" list because of this experience and is thus a recognized business elite.

Eric Glyman, a business angel of Cognition, evaluated Xiao Wu's abilities as "one of the five greatest geniuses I've ever met". The venture capitalist Sarah Guo also said: "Xiao Wu is obviously talented, curious and ambitious."

But geniuses are not rare in the AI industry. Without looking too far back, just look at Dylan Field, the founder of Figma, which recently completed the largest IPO on the US stock exchange this year, or the engineers that Zuckerberg recently recruited with "annual salaries in the millions".

At first, Cognition's product, "Devin AI", was just a "research project" that used GPT - 4 + Reinforcement Learning to enable the AI to autonomously carry out software development.

A Forbes report recorded a detail: Before Christmas 2023, Cognition's small team built an extremely complex data server for Devin. They spent hours studying the installation instructions and testing different commands, but the server didn't work. Tired and frustrated, they decided to see how Devin would handle it. For a long time, the waiting seemed endless, and it seemed that Devin wouldn't do any better. One day, the indicator on the server terminal glowed green for a few hours, and the data server started and worked.

This was the beginning of Xiao Wu's startup, an "insight after an accidental attempt": Devin's first independent fixing of a server error made Cognition's team realize the huge changes that AI can bring to the software industry. Therefore, they decided to start a company and launch the product Devin on the market, which was offered at a price of 500 US dollars per month per person.

In contrast to other tools on the market that only serve as "helpers" for developers, Devin can directly take on the role of an "AI software engineer". This "end - to - end, manageable" technology paradigm is regarded by investors as the "Uber moment of the software outsourcing industry".

Later, there were also different opinions about Devin on the market, just like with other products. Some were amazed at its advanced technologies, while others thought that Devin's abilities were over - rated because many programmers found that Devin, like human programmers, often made mistakes.

Nevertheless, Devin won many big customers such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, MongoDB, Ramp and Nubank with the title of "the world's first AI programmer". The customer feedback is that it can "save millions of US dollars". According to the SVTR.AI venture database, Cognition's ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) last year was less than 500,000 US dollars, which reveals its weakness in commercialization.

It can be seen that both individuals and companies are rather conservative when it comes to trying new things. A programmer friend told me that AI coding products are often related to the core projects of companies, so more careful considerations are made regarding security, and products from big companies are preferred. This is one of the reasons why it is difficult for startups to achieve commercial success quickly.

The company value has increased by over 20 times in a year and a half

Fortunately, Cognition received good financing despite the lack of high revenues.

Since its founding, Cognition has already completed three rounds of financing, and it is reported that the fourth round is currently underway. Although the frequency of financing is not very high, Cognition has achieved a leap in company value each time.

Coincidentally, each company valuation of Cognition was not based on "empty promises", but important measures were taken before each financing to give investors "foundations". This may also be Xiao Wu's genius.

If we look at the timeline, we can clearly see a causality between "measures" and "company value". Cognition operates the "financing rhythm" like a product.

In March 2024, Cognition first released a video of Devin, showing that it could independently fix bugs in open - source libraries. The video received over 30 million views worldwide. At the same time, it was announced that the company had received a Series A financing of 21 million US dollars, led by Founders Fund, and the company value after the investment was 350 million US dollars.

In April 2024, Founders Fund led another additional investment of 175 million US dollars, and the company value directly rose to 2 billion US dollars. Thus, Cognition set the fastest record in Silicon Valley for becoming a unicorn within six months.

John Luttig, a partner at Founders Fund, revealed the reasons for choosing Cognition: "Cognition has already gained the lead, and it will be very difficult to catch up with them in coding."

After two consecutive financing rounds, Cognition redirected its attention to technological products and ecosystems. In May of the same year, it reached a strategic partnership with Microsoft. Devin was deeply integrated into the VS Code and GitHub ecosystems, and Cognition entered the enterprise market through Microsoft's channels, which strengthened brand trust.

In March of this year, the media reported that Cognition had completed a new round of financing. This round was led by 8VC, a venture capital firm of Joe Lonsdale, and old investors such as Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Elad Gil and Conviction Partners also participated in the investment. According to a PitchBook report, the company's value doubled compared to last year's value of 2 billion US dollars.

From Cognition's official website

Subsequently, Cognition released Devin version 2.0. The updated version can start multiple parallel Devins, and each Devin is equipped with an independent cloud - based interactive IDE. Programmers can cooperate with Devin, review and edit its work. At the same time, three new functions were introduced: Interactive Planning, Devin - Search and Devin - Wiki. In terms of commercialization, Devin 2.0 offers flexible pricing starting from 20 US dollars per month per person.

This release was both a demonstration of Cognition's strength and a theoretical verification of the new company value.

Regarding the current financing round, the public speculates that it was suddenly planned, mainly because the recent acquisition of Windsurf was not in Cognition's plans.

Xiao Wu recently announced in a 20VC podcast that the acquisition of Windsurf only cost 220 million US dollars. In fact, this was an extremely cost - effective deal.

Firstly, this brought high attention to Cognition, which is not good at marketing and brand building. Especially when dealing with the former employees of Windsurf, Xiao Wu showed a completely different behavior from the "money - grabbing" founder of Windsurf. For details, please refer to our previous article "The 2 - billion Unicorn Collapses in 72 Hours".

This approach not only won the recognition of the programmer community in Silicon Valley but also the favor in the VC circle.

Secondly, as mentioned above, Cognition's biggest weakness was commercialization. After the acquisition of Windsurf, it got over 300 paying customers and an ARR of 80 million US dollars. This means that Cognition could quickly close the gap with its competitor Cursor in commercialization with one deal, which was hardly imaginable for Cognition a month ago.

Thirdly, with the release of more details of the deal, it was known that the second - best employee of Windsurf decided to decline an offer from Google and join Cognition. In addition to this important member, Cognition also got the remaining team, the core product and the code library of Windsurf. These resources perfectly complement the existing products.

So this deal internally raised Cognition's limits and completed the last piece of the puzzle for a company value of 10 billion US dollars. Externally, Cognition now has a stronger position and can take on giants like OpenAI, Cursor and Anthropic.

While the news of the new financing was circulating, Goldman Sachs announced that it would be the first big bank to test Devin. It said: "First, we will have hundreds of Devins, and depending on the usage, it could be thousands." This surely provides new evidence for the increase in Cognition's company value.

The Matthew Effect is intensifying

Currently, AI coding is one of the hottest application areas of AI, and capital is making large investments in the next generation of software development.

According to incomplete statistics, the financing scale in global AI programming since 2024 has reached nearly 2 billion yuan, with 80% of the capital being taken up by seven top players, such as Cursor with a company value of over 9 billion US dollars, Cognition, which is approaching a company value of 10 billion US dollars, and Magic, which completed a financing of 300 million US dollars. The financings of over a hundred smaller companies were only a fraction of the top players.

In terms of revenues, GitHub Copilot's ARR rose from 100 million US dollars in 2023 to 300 million US dollars in 2024, and Cursor's latest ARR has already reached 500 million US dollars. This means that the two top players have already captured over 80% of the cash flows in the industry. According to a 2025 Stack Overflow survey, the top 3 most commonly used AI programming tools by developers account for 75% of the mentions.

Based on these insights, Xiao Wu predicts that the market structure will probably develop into an oligopoly structure in the future, in which 2 to 6 top players will have the majority of the market shares and other small players will share the rest. This also explains why capital keeps extending olive branches to entrepreneurs.

In the market, the competition in AI programming is getting fiercer. New products and versions are constantly emerging, and market positions are changing rapidly. For example, Anthropic recently granted access rights...